Is China's new silent, flesh-frying laser rifle total BS?

Has China engineered a handheld laser rifle similar to the ray gun blasters of science fiction?

Has China engineered a handheld laser rifle similar to the ray gun blasters of science fiction?

Photo: CSA Images/Mod Art Collection/Getty Images/CSA Images RF

Photo: CSA Images/Mod Art Collection/Getty Images/CSA Images RF

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Has China engineered a handheld laser rifle similar to the ray gun blasters of science fiction?

Has China engineered a handheld laser rifle similar to the ray gun blasters of science fiction?

Photo: CSA Images/Mod Art Collection/Getty Images/CSA Images RF

Is China's new silent, flesh-frying laser rifle total BS?

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Death-ray lasers have been something of a Holy Grail for U.S. military researchers for years, but so far the lasers developed have been mostly limited to bulky drone-killing cannons mounted on trucks or boats.

So when the South China Morning Post reported Sunday that researchers at the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics claimed to have devised a handheld laser rifle capable of instantly "carbonizing" of human flesh from half a mile away, jaws dropped and tweets surged.

The weapon, known as the ZKZM-500, is roughly the size and weight of an AK-47 and costs a relatively inexpensive $15,000 per gun. It supposedly can fire hundreds of invisible laser bursts silently, burning targets in a fraction of a second.

"The pain will be beyond endurance," an unnamed researcher told the Post.

But for some readers, the story was beyond belief. TechCrunch in particular was not swayed by the hype.

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One big problem is the power source. The tech analysis site pointed out that large laser weapon arrays struggle to generate enough heat to produce significant damage if its not concentrated on a particular target for several seconds at a time.

According to the report, the ZKZM-500 is powered by rechargeable lithium-ion batteries capable of producing a thousand two-second shots, the equivalent of a half-hour of zapping stuff.

As TechCrunch explains:

"There's just no way that a laser powered by a lithium-ion battery that a person could carry would be capable of producing the kind of heat described at point-blank range, let alone at 800 meters.

"That's because of attenuation. Lasers, unlike bullets, scatter as they progress, making them weaker and weaker. Attenuation is non-trivial at anything beyond, say, a few dozen meters. By the time you get out to 800, the air and water the beam has traveled through enough to reduce it a fraction of its original power."

Xian Institute, the ball is in your court. There's got to be some video of the ZKZM-500 incinerating a bull's-eye from half a mile away, right?